Scapegoating Children Won't Solve Grown-Up Problems

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Scapegoating Children Won't Solve Grown-Up Problems

It's almost an American tradition to cluck about the decline of the young, but the current wave of scapegoating children for the very problems inflicted on them by their elders has become a social, journalistic, and political outrage.

All through politics and media, the young are portrayed as violent, stupid, drug-addicted, sexually out-of-control, disconnected, apathetic, and vulnerable to cartoons, movies, and action films.

This cultural libel is now so pervasive it's become a national political movement, a widely held belief that draws a diverse following ranging from cultural conservatives like William Bennett and Bob Dole to Boomers like Bill Clinton, Al Gore, and most of mainstream journalism. Posturing about the young was the most frequent theme of both political campaigns, which, despite all the gaseous rhetoric, seem to have no ideas about actually helping them.

Phobias about media and culture - particularly television and the online world - have not only criminally distorted the reality of the lives of the young, but provided a handy way for journalism and politics to avoid most, if not all, of the real causes of the problems of the young.

Mike Males, a doctoral student in social ecology at the University of California, Irvine, and a writer, has written a meticulously researched and utterly convincing book called The Scapegoat Generation: America's War on Adolescents (US$17.95, Common Courage Press), in response. His title provides the young a much more meaningful name than Generation X, and the book itself should be rammed down the throat of every venal politician and blockhead reporter who passes along certain myths about the young: TV and gangsta rap cause violence; teenagers are sexually irresponsible; welfare programs promote teen pregnancy; teen suicide and drug use are "epidemic."

There is so much false information and stupid political rhetoric passed on about the young that Males' book is almost shockingly factual and honest. The real scandal involving America's youth, argues Males, is that while adult America is getting wealthier all the time, the United States has the highest rate of child poverty of any Western nation.

The problems facing children have little to do with media, culture, sexuality, or permissiveness. In the US, 16 million children and teens live in poverty. It's not surprising that violent youth crime is rising rapidly as a consequence - murder is up 50 percent in the past decade, and violent crime arrests have doubled.

But the outpouring of adult outrage over the source of these problems is the worst kind of hypocrisy.

"Liberals and conservatives have joined in rampant escapism on 'youth violence,'" writes Males. "The issue is not racial dysgenics and the debilitating effects of the welfare state, as conservatives claim, nor is it liberal scapegoats such as 'media violence,' and 'gun availability.'"

These knee-jerk responses to the problems of the young fail to acknowledge the stark reality that race, class, gender, era, family background, and locality are far greater predictors of violence than young age. In fact, found Males, when these factors are fully accounted for, age predicts little about violence.

Journalists can only pass along information. They provide us with little, so we can't make many distinctions between the kids who are in genuine danger and the kids who aren't. A survey in The New York Times last year reported that more Americans - nearly a third - blamed TV for violence than any other single source, including family problems.

Males points out that although public officials are quick to blame violent media, rap, and videogames when murder rates are reported to be rising among the young, they rarely point out that in rural and suburban areas, the murder rate is almost nonexistent for kids, even though the same dread media blaring out of boom boxes and underclass tenements are pouring out of split-level stereos and TV screens.

As the l996 presidential campaign has demonstrated so convincingly, the scapegoating of the young is now a bipartisan political theme. Bob Dole regularly reviews movies and warns about drugs, and Bill Clinton has endorsed a whole new generation of useless censorship technology - from V-chips to blocking software - that won't help any children in need, and will only annoy those who aren't.

Males has really written an indictment of journalism as well as politics. If politicians are expected to exploit issues, journalists are supposed to tell the truth about them. Males offers lots of truth. His book provides the young with some badly needed ammunition to fight back against their being scapegoated by people who do - or should - know better.

Scapegoat Generation should be hidden in backpacks and lunch boxes, offered up on Web sites, and stuffed inside Bill Bennett's hoary books of moral tales, so the young can at least know the truth, even if they can't do much about it.